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First and foremost I want to congratulate you for making it through those first four paragraphs (I ran out of time writing the fifth). Writing that was painful and I can imagine that reading it was just as tormenting. The fact of the matter is the five paragraph essay should not exist. The only people that actually want to read essays in this format are the people that are paid to grade them on standardized tests, and even they only do it for the money. This brings me to the biggest issue with NCLB that fits into every single category that I highlighted in those three body paragraphs: teaching to the test. Everyone has heard this term teaching to the test, but parents and citizens cant really understand exactly what it means until they see what our students are being taught to produce. You just read how students today not only write for standardized tests, but how they write for any essay that they are given because it is what they know. Boring, right? This skill does not translate to the real world; this essay would be thrown in the trash before most readers made it through the second paragraph. I provided you with plenty of facts in my five paragraph essay. I emphasized an abundance of problems attributed to NCLB that would help you understand the failure of the program; I did exactly what the prompt asked of me. My content became less important to the grader, though, because I failed to follow the strict five paragraph essay format at times. Therefore, my true strongest point was the essay itself. I could have given you all of those facts and so much more in an attention grabbing, intriguing, unconventional way that would have kept you engaged and interested in everything you were reading. It may not have received a high grade, but real life is not graded on a scale from one to nine. However, I was crippled by the five paragraph essay format desired by standardized tests that leaves even paid graders bored and uninterested. Teaching to the test is harming our students and nothing is more to blame than NCLB.

Junior year of high school I had to take the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA), and in order to graduate I had to pass the exam. Even though it was a very high stakes exam, none of my classmates were worried. For the past three years we had been told about the content of the HSPA by upperclassmen who had taken it and we laughed at the absurdity of the exam. We had multiple math sections that high school freshmen and sophomores should have been able to pass, forty five minutes to write an expository essay, and sixty minutes to write a persuasive letter. SIXTY MINUTES. That year I had been taught to write an essay in thirty minutes with as much content and much greater quality, but about a month before HSPA my English teacher had to reteach the five paragraph essay to us because the state-wide standardized test called for it. My English teacher was a writing expert and had worked to transform and improve all of our writing for six months. She helped me discover who I wanted to be as a writer and pushed me to improve with every essay. However, she was degraded to teaching a skill that I learned in fifth grade. She had to backtrack and teach to the test. It was as if we had learned how to ride a bike and shift gears, yet for some reason the training wheels were being placed back on. Some of my classmates were never able to return to their previous writing methods after that. They had forgotten to ride the bike and were stuck on the five paragraph essay. They suffered greatly because of it.

Education should be about more than filling in bubbles and writing a five paragraph essay. I chose to major in education because teachers have a major impact on students. Teachers provide students with the tools to make a difference in the world. My teachers have pushed me to reach my greatest potential, and I could always tell the difference between their content teaching versus the yearly teaching to the test that they were forced into. All of this teaching to the test was supposed to produce students who were one hundred percent proficient by this year. Surprise! It didnt happen. NCLB advocates still point to the rise in test scores over the past years as evidence of success, but does the rise in test scores reflect true achievement? From my own experience, I could say with a great amount of certainty that it does not. When I experienced teaching to the test in the past, my teachers focused on a small subset of skills and test taking strategies that taught me nothing transferable to the real world. I was basically in school for no reason. Since NCLB advocates like to point to research and data, though, I will do the same to defend my argument and debunk theirs. Harvard University professor Daniel Koretz actually conducted a demonstration to prove that standardized test scores do not reflect achievement. He chose a school district and administered a new standardized test that they had never seen before; scores fell remarkably. However, as the teachers prepped students over the next four years, the scores continued to rise. After four years, Koretz administered the old test again. Can you guess what happened? The plummet in scores that resulted proved that NCLB advocates argument has no merit. Rises in test scores dont occur because students are learning content knowledge. Rises in test scores occur because students are learning the test and how to take it. NCLB has led to twelve years of damage, but this damage can be undone. Standardized testing is necessary to take the education temperature of the nation and provide help to schools in

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need, but that is where it should stop. The failure of NCLB lies in its extra step, but in this case taking steps backward will actually be progress. This year the College Board took major steps towards improving the SAT. Instead of measuring how well students can take a test, the College Board wants the SAT to test more content knowledge. All standardized tests should follow this route. A major overhaul to concentrate on content allows teachers to once again be teachers rather than test experts and procters. In just one year of education classes I have learned that all students are different and a one size fits all solution will never work. I understand that this is a hard concept to swallow because it is difficult to accept that there can be no hero that fixes everything, but every teacher can be a hero when he or she isnt forced to teach to the test. Without NCLB, teachers have freedom to use their pedagogical knowledge to educate students in broader areas than just filling in a bubble on an answer sheet correctly or writing a five paragraph essay flawlessly. Neither one of these behaviors reflects true achievement, test scores or not. True achievement will be seen when standardized tests contain questions and content that makes teaching to the test synonymous with effective teaching.

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